Skin remembers how long the years grow <br />when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel <br />of singleness, feather lost from the tail <br />of a bird, swirling onto a step, <br />swept away by someone who never saw <br />it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, <br />slept by itself, knew how to raise a <br />see-you-later hand. But skin felt <br />it was never seen, never known as <br />a land on the map, nose like a city, <br />hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque <br />and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope. <br /> <br />Skin had hope, that's what skin does. <br />Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. <br />Love means you breathe in two countries. <br />And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass, <br />deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own. <br />Even now, when skin is not alone, <br />it remembers being alone and thanks something larger <br />that there are travelers, that people go places <br />larger than themselves.<br /><br />Naomi Shihab Nye<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/two-countries/
